The Last Guests of the Season

The room was empty when I walked in, which in Dry Creek Valley on a Thursday afternoon in November is not unusual, and I was glad of it. I have been a founding member of this winery’s club for years. I had missed the pickup party the month before and hadn’t tasted the new releases, and I wanted to taste them from the standard flight, so I could hear what the room was telling people who didn’t already love the place. I said all of that to the host, who was new to me. He nodded, slid a printed tasting sheet across the counter, the kind with a paragraph of notes under each wine, and poured the rosé.

Six wines. The rosé, then a Zinfandel, a Pinot, a Malbec, a Cabernet, and some bubbles to finish. With each one he read me the paragraph off the sheet, quickly, in the voice of a man who had read that paragraph fifty times that week, and then went back to the far end of the counter where he had a book open face down. When my glass got low he came back, poured, read, and returned to the book. In between he turned pages, or wiped a stretch of counter that was already clean. He didn’t ask what I thought of anything. He didn’t tell me where the Zin fruit came from, which in Dry Creek is the whole conversation. The Malbec was a new release, the first vintage of it they had ever poured, and it arrived with the same paragraph at the same speed as the rosé. He never asked what I’d made of last year’s Zin, or which of the new ones I’d been waiting for, though I had told him at the door exactly why I was there. I had come in to buy, a case split between the Zin and the Cab. I drank the bubbles and set the glass down. I walked out, and neither of us said a word.

It wasn’t always that room. On every visit before that one, whoever was behind the counter either knew me at the door or had my name by the second pour, because the people who worked there knew who the founding members were and acted like it. They poured each glass and told me why it was the way it was. One year the rain came early and cold and kept coming until Dry Creek itself went over its banks and the low blocks stood in water, and the host walked me through what that did to the fruit and what the winemaker had to do about it when the grapes finally came in. Nobody was selling me anything. I grew up around farms in West Gardiner, Maine, where what the weather did that year was the whole conversation at the kitchen table, and a man who tells a stranger about his rain is not selling him anything either. Somebody was telling me what had happened on the property since I was last there, and by the time the flight was done I was inside the story. I bought the way a person buys when he is inside it. I didn’t join that club for the discount. I joined because the room made me feel like the place was partly mine.

I have turned that November afternoon over more than it deserves. The host wasn’t rude. He wasn’t busy. He had one guest and a book, and he went with the book. If the winery keeps a checklist for a tasting, every line on it got ticked. My glass never sat empty. And a founding member who had driven in to spend money drove out without spending any, and the property will never know, because nothing on an end-of-day report counts the guest who left quietly.

November does this to tasting rooms. It looks nothing like November in Maine, where I come from, but it feels the same. The season is over and the vines have gone to rust and yellow. The seasonal hosts are gone, the hours shorten, and whoever is left behind the counter finds a pace that fits an empty room. The trouble is who walks into that room. Nobody drives to Dry Creek on a Thursday in November for the scene. The people who come are the members, and the ones for whom this was the one stop that mattered on a trip that was really about something else, and they are the ones who get the half-lit room and a host who has already decided what the afternoon is going to be.

There is a hotel in Colorado I think about whenever this happens to me, because the same afternoon went the other way there once, on the deadest night of its year, and the place has been living on it for fifty years.

In the fall of 1974, on the last night before the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park closed for the winter, a young couple from Boulder drove up the hill in bad weather and asked for a room. The hotel had no heat and wouldn’t for nine more years, so once the cold came it shut until spring, and most of the staff had already gone. The few people left nearly sent the couple back down to the motels in town. Somebody didn’t. He checked them in, and since all 140 rooms were empty, he gave them 217, the presidential suite, because there was no reason not to.

The couple were Stephen and Tabitha King. They ate in a dining room with the chairs turned up on every other table. After Tabitha went up, Stephen had a drink poured by the off-season caretaker, a man named Lloyd Grady, and then walked the halls for a while, a long run of empty carpet that had been full of people a month earlier. Back in 217 he dreamed his small son was being chased down those halls by a fire hose, and woke up with The Shining. The bartender in the novel is Lloyd. The caretaker who kills his family is Grady. The man who poured that nightcap got into one of the most read books of the century for the price of standing there and talking.

I was a student of King’s at the University of Maine a few years after that night, before the hotel or anyone else had made a legend of it. The hotel’s version is the one I know, and the hotel tells it every day on the historic tour, which stops outside 217 so people can photograph a door.

The Stanley was never supposed to be in the ghost business. F.O. Stanley was a Kingfield, Maine man, from up the road and a couple of generations before me, who made his money on steam cars. He came to Estes Park in 1903 with tuberculosis because a doctor told him to go breathe mountain air. It worked, and in 1909 he opened a big white Georgian hotel so other people with money could sit on the mountain and breathe too. For sixty-five years that is all it was, a summer hotel that filled in June and emptied in September, and by 1974 the money was gone and the building was tired. What saved it was a guest who stayed one night, told the story for the rest of his life, and never asked the hotel for a thing. Room 217 now books a year out. The movie plays on a loop on the television in every room, which the hotel manages with a straight face even though Kubrick didn’t shoot a frame of it there. All October the building is lit red at night, the Shining Ball in the concert hall sold out weeks ago, and there is a masquerade in the same hall on the thirty-first. The whole operation runs on one night the hotel almost didn’t let happen.

There is a footnote. When Kubrick made the film he used Timberline Lodge in Oregon for the exteriors, and Timberline asked him to change the room number from 217 to 237 so nobody would be afraid to sleep in their real 217. He did it, and fifty years later Timberline’s 217 is a room with a number on the door, while the Stanley’s is booked a year out by people who want to sleep where a writer had a bad dream.

Nobody at the Stanley’s desk in 1974 knew who was standing there. They saw a tired man with a beard, a tired woman, Colorado plates, and a request that meant somebody would be working an extra hour on the last night of the year. They said yes, and then they did the harder part, which was to treat the last guests of a dead season like the first guests of a new one. They gave them a real room and a real dinner. Somebody poured the man a drink and stood there and talked to him. The host in Dry Creek had one guest, a quiet room, and a whole afternoon to do the same, and he read his book.

Six of the Zin and six of the Cab were going in the car that day. It would have taken about four minutes of him looking up. I’m still a member, and I haven’t been back.